So, along comes a progressive idea to help fuel our larger progressive revolution:

At the One World Café in Salt Lake City, customers set the price for their organic, fair-trade meals. Urbanite reports that One World provides options for all customers, from homeless patrons to business folks on their lunch breaks. A daily free entrée is always on the menu and the restaurant offers a “hand-up, not a hand-out” option by exchanging meal coupons for every hour of volunteer service. At the end of the day, says founder Denise Cerreta, the restaurant ends up with a fair price for the staff’s work.

Even though most of us don’t live in Salt Lake City, we can still be glad that such wonderful efforts are being made. And there are things we can do to help those suffering in poverty feed themselves better. Amongst many charities we could lend hand or buck is America’s Second Harvest. And what is America’s Second Harvest, pray tell? Here goes:

America’s Second Harvest– ”The Nation’s Food Bank Network is the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization:

• A network of more than 200 member food banks and food-rescue organizations
• Serving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

The America’s Second Harvest Network secures and distributes more than 2 billion pounds of donated food and grocery products annually. Each year, the America’s Second Harvest Network provides food assistance to more than 25 million low-income hungry people in the United States, including more than 9 million children and nearly 3 million seniors.

There’s not enough props we can give this organization. So here’s the deal — just give five. (All you’ve got to do is click this sentence.) Five bucks to most of us is next to nothing–a McMeal or a summer blockbuster we wish, afterwards, that we’d skipped. To an organization that feeds those with next to nothing, five bucks is nothing they’ll sneeze at (though, I imagine 100 dollars wouldn’t make them sneeze either… really I doubt any amount of would make them sneeze, so don’t worry about the infinitesimally small chance that you might make someone sneeze).

So, here’s to good food (and tissues) for all.

I subscribe to more magazines than my eyes, noggin, and free time can handle, but subscribe to them I do. Often, this leads to a lot of skimming, looking for articles about topics I’m hungry to learn more about, looking for articles that might be pertinent to Progressive Wednesday.

A piece in an issue of Business 2.0 couldn’t be ignored. According to an article by Carleen Hawn, close to a billion people in the world live hungry. And then I read this:

Malnutrition kills more people annually than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, [and] the United Nations says a child dies from the complications of malnutrition every five seconds.

The average person reads 250-350 words per minute, which means that by the time you read the end of this post, approximately 30 children will have died from a lack of food.

All hope ain’t lost, though. There are many fantastic organizations out there battling this exact problem: World Food Programme, Unicef, America’s Second Harvest, Meds & Food For Kids, and Oxfam, amongst several others (all of which would graciously accept your donations).

But, once again, there’s a way to make money and make the lives of those suffering better. Nutriset, a French business that describes itself as a “company fully dedicated to humanitarian and social programs,” has developed a new product called “Plumpy’nut” (I gotta say, I would have come up with a less, I don’t know, goofy name). They doled out 500,000 of these über-nutritious bars last year. Each bar contains 500 calories, ground peanuts, whey protein, vitamins, and minerals. One of the most important features of this product is that it isn’t perishable.

Plumpy’nut succeeds where powdered milk fails because it doesn’t require clean drinking water. In Darfur alone, this product has cut malnutrition in half. And according a piece in the N.Y. Times, Plumpy’nut can even be fed to babies to help jump-start growth.

Here’s the amazing part for the company: they sold $25 million last year alone by saving people’s lives. And what do they do with that money? They reinvest 80 percent of their profits into research and development.

So here’s a business with a heart the size of a home, making money while helping to end malnutrition. I believe this drives home the point (without making a quick pit stop at 7-Eleven for a Big Gulp) we’re always trying to make at Progressive Wednesday: Baby, the end of big problems starts with small solutions.

So, along comes a progressive idea to help fuel our larger progressive revolution:

At the One World Café in Salt Lake City, customers set the price for their organic, fair-trade meals. Urbanite reports that One World provides options for all customers, from homeless patrons to business folks on their lunch breaks. A daily free entrée is always on the menu and the restaurant offers a “hand-up, not a hand-out” option by exchanging meal coupons for every hour of volunteer service. At the end of the day, says founder Denise Cerreta, the restaurant ends up with a fair price for the staff’s work.

Even though most of us don’t live in Salt Lake City, we can still be glad that such wonderful efforts are being made. And there are things we can do to help those suffering in poverty feed themselves better. Amongst many charities we could lend hand or buck is America’s Second Harvest. And what is America’s Second Harvest, pray tell? Here goes:

America’s Second Harvest– ”The Nation’s Food Bank Network is the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization:

• A network of more than 200 member food banks and food-rescue organizations
• Serving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

The America’s Second Harvest Network secures and distributes more than 2 billion pounds of donated food and grocery products annually. Each year, the America’s Second Harvest Network provides food assistance to more than 25 million low-income hungry people in the United States, including more than 9 million children and nearly 3 million seniors.

There’s not enough props we can give this organization. So here’s the deal — just give five. (All you’ve got to do is click this sentence.) Five bucks to most of us is next to nothing–a McMeal or a summer blockbuster we wish, afterwards, that we’d skipped. To an organization that feeds those with next to nothing, five bucks is nothing they’ll sneeze at (though, I imagine 100 dollars wouldn’t make them sneeze either… really I doubt any amount of would make them sneeze, so don’t worry about the infinitesimally small chance that you might make someone sneeze).

So, here’s to good food (and tissues) for all.

According to a recent article The Economist, the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Congo is 4,200 square kilometers and has 14 park rangers. In the past year, they’ve caught no poachers. This isn’t because there’s no poaching. For example:

Last year poachers are estimated to have killed more than 23,000 African elephants. According to a study by the University of Washington, that is about one in 17 of the continent’s total.

So the good folks running the park are going to place special metal detectors and smoke detectors (poachers often smoke the meat) along trails and in trees. When a poacher trips a detector, a signal goes right to the rangers with exact coordinates. Many people in the Congo believe, quite strongly, in magic, and “local people will receive no explanation for the rangers’ new powers.” The hope is that this will both stop poachers in their tracks (or rather, the apes’, jaguars’ and elephants’ tracks) and discourage poaching in the first place.

So what can you do from the comfort of your computer? We’ll give you three:

1. Sign the pledge from Wild Aid and the Active Conservation Awareness Program, urging world leaders to do their part in putting an end to poaching. The ACAP is hoping to get 25 million signatures by 2008. Let’s be part of this effort.
2. Consider donating a measly five smackers to Wild Aid. All you’ve got to do is click this sentence. Just so you know they’re as legit as it gets, you can click right here to go to a National Geographic article on the organization. And you can listen to the executive director of Wild Aid on NPR by clicking here.
3. Tell a pal about Wild Aid. You can do this by clicking this sentence, or by clicking the “Share This” button at the bottom-left of this post. This is a very important action because Wild Aid “guarantee[s] that 100% of donations from the public go straight to the field,” so free marketing is the best marketing.
   

Picture clicked by this friend of pachyderms.

The Victory Junction Gang Camp is located in Randleman, North Carolina. Their mission? Glad you asked.

The Victory Junction Gang Camp enriches the lives of children with chronic medical conditions or serious illnesses by providing life-changing camping experiences that are exciting, fun, and empowering, in a safe and medically sound environment.

Each week of the year, a group of kids with a specific disease or disability gets a chance to participate in normal camp activities that their illness would otherwise not allow. The camp concentrates on activities that allow the kids to participate without becoming overwhelmed.

But the best part is that the camp is completely free to the children and their families, including medical treatment that they receive while at camp. It runs strictly on generous contributions of time and money from almost every driver on the NASCAR circuit, corporate sponsors, private individuals, and medical institutions.

Getting involved is easier than driving in a circle. They offer, of course, the usual donations page along with tips on how you can have that donation matched or even tripled. But if you find it difficult to make a monetary donation, you can still use your time, talent or even stuff that is kicking around the house that you don't use anymore. Check out their wish list page and see if there is anything on it that you would be able to send their way. Whether it's a set of maracas or a broom and dust pan, there's something on there that everyone has lying around the house.

Oh, and each camper sleeps on a bed with a hand-made quilt and takes home a hand-made afghan and teddy bear. So if you have that incredible talent, please put it to good use. You can get more details here.